CHAP. from the flight of the great and powerful body by whom it should have been supported. VI. 1791. 70. its behalf. The plan of Mirabeau was to facilitate the escape of His plan on the King from Paris to Compiègne, or Fontainebleau ; that he should there place himself under the guidance of the able and intrepid M. de Bouillé, assemble a royal army, call to his support the remaining friends of order, and openly employ force to stem the torrent.* He pledged himself for the immediate support of thirty departments, and the ultimate adhesion of thirty-six more. Between the contending parties, he flattered himself he should be able to act as mediator, and restore the monarchy to the consideration it had lost, by founding it on the basis of constitutional freedom. "I would not wish," said he, in a letter to the King, "to be always employed in the vast work of destruction ;" and, in truth, his ambition was now to repair the havoc which he himself had made in the social system. He was strongly impressed with the idea, which was in all probability well founded, that if the King could be brought to put himself at the head of the constitutional party, and resist the further progress of democracy, the country might yet be saved. "You know not," said he, "to what a degree France is still attached to the King, and that its ideas are still essentially monarchical. The moment the King recovers his freedom, the Assembly will be reduced to nothing: it is a colossus with the aid of his name without it, it would be a mountain of sand. There will be some movements at the Palais Royal, and that will be all. Should Lafayette attempt to play the part of Washington, at the head of the national guard, "Le plan de contre-révolution de M. Mirabeau était dirigé dans un mémoire qui existe encore chez M. de Montmorin, et où l'Assemblée Constituante était traitée avec horreur et avec mépris le plus profond. Mirabeau entendait monter,-1, Une machine de corruption dans les tribunes, les sections, les clubs. 2, Une machine d'écrits. 3, Des inspecteurs des cadastres qu'il eut envoyés dans les départments sous prétexte de vivifier les rôles d'impositions, et qu'il eut employés á semer ces écrits. 4, Provoquer les adresses des departments au Roi, pour démander la dissolution de l'Assemblée et un nouveau corps legislatif. 5, Il jurait soutenir ces adresses par M. de Bouillé et son armée."-MALLET DU PAN, i. 229. VI. 1 Lac. viii. he will speedily, and deservedly, perish." He relied upon CHAP. the influence of the clergy, who were now openly committed against the Revolution, with the rural population, 1791. and on the energy and intrepidity of the Queen, as suffi-127, 128. cient to counterbalance all the consequences of the vacil- Stael,i,405, lation of the King. But, in the midst of these magnifi- 280.Dum. cent designs, he was cut off by death. A constitution 211, 257. naturally strong sank under the accumulated pressure of 53. ambition, excitement, and excessive indulgence.1 406. Th. i. 207, 210, Weber, ii. 71. April 2. His death, albeit that of a sceptic, had something in it sublime. He was no stranger to his approaching dis- His death. solution; but, far from being intimidated by the prospect, he gloried in the name he was to leave. Hearing the cannon discharge upon some public event, he exclaimed, "I already hear the funeral obsequies of Achilles-after my death, the factions will tear to shreds the remnants of the monarchy." His sufferings were severe at the close of his illness at one period, when the power of speech was gone, he wrote on a slip of paper the words of Hamlet, "To die is to sleep." "When a sick man is given over, and he suffers frightful pains, can a friendly physician refuse to give him opium ?" "My pains are insupportable; I have an age of strength, but not an instant of courage. A few hours before his death, the commencement of mortification relieved his sufferings. Remove from the bed," said he, "all that sad apparatus. Instead of these useless precautions, surround me with the perfumes and the flowers of spring; dress my hair with care: let me fall asleep amidst the sound of harmonious music." He then spoke for ten minutes with such vivid and touching eloquence, that every one in the room was melted into tears. "When I am no more," said he, my worth will become known. The misfortunes which I have held back will then pour on all sides upon France; the criminal faction which now trembles before me will be unbridled. I have before my eyes unbounded presentiments of disaster. We now CHAP. VI. 1791. see how much we erred in not preventing the commons from assuming the name of the National Assembly; since they gained that victory, they have never ceased to show themselves unworthy of it. They have chosen to govern the King, instead of governing by him; but soon neither he nor they will rule the country, but a vile faction, which will overspread it with horrors." A spasm, attended with violent convulsions, having returned, he again asked for laudanum. "When nature," said he, " has abandoned an unhappy victim, when a miracle only could save his life, de Paris, 3d how can you have the barbarity to let him expire on the wheel?" His feet were already cold, but his countenance ix. 385, 389, still retained its animation, his eye its wonted fire, as if De Stael, i. death spared to the last the abode of so much genius. Feigning to comply, they gave him a cup, containing what they assured him was laudanum. He calmly drank it off, fell back on his pillow, and expired.1 1 Chronique and 4th April. 408. Lac. viii. 133. Dumont, 267, 268. 72. His character. He Such was the end of Mirabeau, the first master-spirit who arose amidst the troubles of the Revolution. was upwards of forty years of age when he entered public life; but his reputation was already great at the opening of the States-general, and he was looked to as the tribune who was to support the cause of the people against the violence of the crown. Endowed with splendid talents, but impelled by insatiable ambition; gifted with a clear intellect, but the prey of inordinate passions; sagacious in the perception of truth, but indifferent as to the means by which distinction was to be acquired; without great information derived from study, but with an unrivalled power of turning what he possessed to the best account ; bold in design, but reckless of purpose-he affords a memorable example of the inefficacy of mere intellectual power and resolution to supply the want of moral, or to compensate the absence of religious feeling. He was too impetuous to make himself master of any subject; studied nothing profoundly, and owed almost all the writings to which his name was attached, and many of the speeches VI. 1791. which he delivered, to Dumont and Duroverai, who aided CHAP. him in his herculean labours. His chief talent consisted in a strong and ardent imagination, a nervous elocution, and an unrivalled power of discerning at once the spirit of the assembly which he was addressing, and applying the whole force of his mind to the point from which the resistance proceeded. Great as his influence was in the Assembly, it was less than it would have been, but for the consequences of his irregular life; and the general belief entertained of his want of principle made the league with the court, in the close of his career, be ascribed to venal, when it was rather owing to patriotic motives. His inordinate passions cut him short in the most splendid period of his career-in the vigour of his talents, and the zenith of his power, when he was about to undertake the glorious task of healing the wounds and curbing the violence of the Revolution. His primary object was to acquire distinction: he espoused at first the popular 1 De Stael, side, because it offered the fairest chance of gaining cele- i. 186, 259. brity; he was prepared at last to leave it, when he found 124, 125, the gales of popular favour inclining to others more san- 277. guinary and less enlightened than himself.1 Th. i. 123, Dum, 276, obsequies. His death was felt by all as a public calamity: by the 73. people, because he had been the early leader and intrepid And funeral champion of freedom; by the royalists, because they April 4. trusted to his support against the violence of the democratic party. All Paris assembled at his funeral obsequies, which were celebrated with extraordinary pomp by torchlight, amidst the tears of innumerable spectators. Twenty thousand national guards, and delegates from all the sections of Paris, accompanied the corpse to the Pantheon, where it was placed by the remains of Descartes. The coffin was borne by the grenadiers of the battalion of La Grange-Batelière, which he commanded: vi. 49, 51. deputations from the sixty battalions of the national Lac. viii. guard of Paris, with Lafayette at their head, joined in the Stacl, i. 408. procession. The church of St Geneviève was hung with 2 Hist. Parl. x. 389, 390. Deux Amis, Th. i. 282. 135. De VI. CHAP. black, and the body lowered into the grave at midnight amidst volleys of musketry. The bones of Voltaire, and 1791. subsequently those of Rousseau, were soon after removed to the same cemetery; over the noble portico of which were inscribed the words-" Aux Grandes Ames la Patrie Reconnoissante." 74. views of men in Paris volution. The literary and philosophical characters in Paris, who Changed had done so much to urge on the tempest of democracy, the literary were now fully sensible of the ungovernable nature of the on the Re- power which they had excited. Volney, long one of Mirabeau's intimate friends, openly expressed, in his caustic way, his sense of the thraldom which the Assembly had imposed on itself. "Can you pretend," said he, "to command silence to the galleries? Our masters sit there; it is but reasonable they should applaud or censure their servants' speeches." "I am astonished to hear you," said one of the bystanders to the Abbé Sabatier, who had first originated the cry for the States-general, "rail so violently at an assembly which you had so powerful a hand in calling into existence."—"Yes," replied the abbé, "but they have changed my States-general at nurse." "The States-general," said Marmontel, "always remind me of an expression of Madame de Sevigné-I would admire Provence if I had never seen the Provençaux.' 1 Dumont, 250, 252, Ségur, iii. 384. 75. the Assem Philanthropic ideas meanwhile formed the ruling prinDebate in ciples of the ruling party in France. On the 30th May bly on the a motion was brought forward in the Assembly by Lepelpunishment letier St Fargeau, for the entire abolition of the punishand Robes- ment of death. It proceeded on the report of a compierre's speech on it. mittee to whom the matter had been referred, which bore, May 30. of death, "That punishments should be humane, justly accommodated in gradation to crime, equal towards all citizens, exempt from all judicial power; repressive chiefly by their prolonged nature and privations; public, and carried into execution near the places of the crime; that they should improve the mind of the convict by the habit of labour, and decline in severity as the period of their termination |